Christopher Faraone
Christopher Faraone
Edward Olson Professor of Classics in the Department of Classics and the College
An effort to re-edit and re-translate a set of ancient magical handbooks from Graeco-Roman Egypt opened paths for exploring the practices by which ancient knowledge was transmitted. |
Thanks to the climatological conditions and scribal practices of Graeco-Roman Egypt, a number of handbooks from that region (and from no other in the Graeco-Roman ancient world) have reached us. These handbooks are precious witnesses to practices and processes of cultural transmission: the creation, communication, transformation, and preservation of knowledge (both in text and image) across history. Among these handbooks some of the most numerous concern magical knowledge, a field, it should be noted, of extraordinary diffusion and interest, from Mesopotamia to the present. These ancient magical handbooks provide unique entry into a corpus of knowledge at a particular period in a very long history that is otherwise lightly documented, and to the practices by which that field of knowledge was taught and transmitted. More than 40 such handbooks survive, some of them in a fragmentary state. This project re-edited and re-translated these handbooks, as well as carried out the first large-scale study of them as material objects and media of cultural transmission.
Edward Olson Professor of Classics in the Department of Classics and the College
Morton D. Hull Distinguished Service Professor of Egyptology, the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and the Program on the Ancient Mediterranean World in the Department of Classics
Professor of Classics and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations